The trial of 'Foxy Knoxy' highlighted the gulf between the legal systems and
social values of Italy and the US, and a defendant who refused to conform.

Outside the courtroom in Perugia on Monday night, Italians booed and heckled, shouting “Give us Amanda!”, shaking their fists and threatening rough justice. A few paces away, a gaggle of airbrushed American television reporters excitedly broke the news to their audiences back home: “Amanda Knox is cleared of murder!”

Not since O J Simpson was tried for the murder of his wife Nicole has a court case gripped two continents in this way. Office staff in the US, where it was mid-afternoon, were allowed to stand by television sets and await the verdict from Perugia. But it was not only the cliff-hanger finale that drew everyone to this extraordinary courtroom drama.

Throughout, the case had ignited passions among those who saw this as a clash of cultures: the American legal system pitted against Italian justice; Italy’s conservative mores (soiled but not erased by prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s antics) confronting the more liberal Anglo-Saxon mindset.

And at the centre of it was not the victim, Meredith Kercher, but the well-brought-up girl from Seattle who stood accused of a murder that, the prosecution invited us to think, echoed a ritual sacrifice in its barbaric horror. From the first, the media pounced on “Foxy Knoxy”. Every titbit to emerge from the case – a boastful Facebook entry, a lingerie shopping expedition, the admission that there was a sex toy among her belongings – received prominent coverage, as did every new photograph of the impossibly photogenic accused.

Amanda Knox became a familiar figure through a succession of still photographs: with her glossy hair, unplucked eyebrows and nubile body she was reminiscent of a young Brooke Shields. Like Shields, Knox appeared to combine preppy innocence with knowing seduction. It was a siren song that seems to have convinced men around the world of her innocence, while plenty of women chose to see in her a little vixen who manipulated first her boyfriends, then the defence lawyers and the world’s media, and finally judge and jury.

Yet supporters and critics alike were projecting on to a blank canvas: although the judge broke with convention at the close, Italian law does not usually allow television cameras in the courtroom, so few outside the trial had ever heard Amanda Knox speak. (And even when she did, at the very last, the pictures were blurry and her voice was so low as to be barely audible.) Her silence wrapped the accused in an aura of mystery that her Mona Lisa half-smiles only intensified.

American television and the legal system provides total access to high-profile defendants like OJ Simpson and the British nanny Louise Woodward; exposure that leaves no room for the imagination. Not so with Amanda Knox, who continued to fascinate and intrigue.

The American abroad, with her self-possessed expression and wild reputation, tantalised us with her contradictions: part ingénue, like Henry James’s Daisy Miller, she seemed to have left a cloistered American upbringing and stumbled straight into her misfortune, seduced by seedy continentals who exploited her wide-eyed openness. But another version of the Amanda Knox story seemed to owe more to a different American novel, The Secret History. In Donna Tartt’s psychological thriller, a close-knit band of university students, in thrall to a sinister professor, collude in bacchanalian orgies that climax in the murder of one of their own.

Amanda Knox can write (her prison diary will doubtless hit the bestseller lists in the new year); she knows how to dress (has any young woman taken to the witness stand in such a variety of figure-hugging knitwear?); and she likes sex (this, by her own admission – and plenty of witness statements confirm it). But she refused to play the role that popular imagination, fed by fictional courtroom dramas, would assign to her. When the accused is a young beauty, she should grieve publicly and loudly, pleading either her innocence or cruel extenuating circumstances; she should be racked with sobs, guilt, or both. It seems to have thrown many observers that Amanda Knox did none of those things.

Just 22 when she was sentenced to 26 years’ imprisonment (Italy, unlike her native America, does not have the death penalty – a point Italian commentators have made repeatedly over the past 24 hours), “Foxy Knoxy” indulged in some bizarre antics following her arrest, including doing cartwheels and the splits in the police station; but never once did she look terrified or tearful. This behaviour scandalised Italians, whose Catholicism preaches the possibility of redemption – but only once heartfelt repentance takes place.

Italians have resented, too, the spectacle of a foreign girl who could buy special treatment – an appeal – denied most of their compatriots. The wheels of Italian justice do not only spin slowly, they often require the lubricant of money to spin at all. An ordinary citizen can languish in prison for up to a year before any charges need be filed against them. “Due process” can go on, and on, for a decade. Police can carry out interrogations without recording questions or answers. Italians know that, all too often, without the proverbial bustarella, a brown envelope stuffed with euros, miscarriages of justice go unnoticed.

Last summer, in my own village in Piedmont, I was shocked to find builders knocking down a listed building: it had become dangerous, according to the notice outside, following an earthquake earlier that week. When I pointed out to the workers that I hadn’t noticed the slightest tremor, the foreman winked. “OK,” he said, raising his hands to heaven, “but this way we can get our new house built.”

The Amanda Knox case has shaken Italy’s justice system more than any earthquake could, yet many Italians resent the exposure of its weaknesses by seemingly pushy, wealthy Americans like the Knox family. Talk of chat show hosts lining up to interview the celebrity martyr, of book deals and of one interviewer offering a million dollars for an exclusive, have outraged Italians’ sense of propriety: America’s commercialisation of even this tragedy strikes them as offensive.

But the chasm between the two cultures runs deeper. Perugia is a charming medieval university town. American, British and German students have colonised the bars lining the cobblestoned piazzas, drinking Peroni beer and texting family and friends with the latest news of their gap year (if they are British) or exchange (the American “junior year abroad” is a rite of passage for many university students).

Locals ignore the academic context of their stay: the notion of the gap year is unknown in Italy, where youngsters attend the university in their home town and live with their parents. Provincials navigating the narrow confines of tight-knit families and conservative mores probably saw Amanda Knox and her student friends as adventurers in search of thrills: oversexed, underdressed and over here. “Foxy Knoxy” was asking for trouble by putting an ocean between herself and her parents.

In the end, the trial revealed little about the real Amanda Knox, or about what happened to young Meredith Kercher, but a great deal about American culture, our prurient media, and, above all, Italian justice. Through a calamitously mishandled prosecution, a young student became an object of worldwide fascination, condemned by many because of her good looks and her composure. And now, after four years, we will finally hear her speak.